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Computer & Mathematical Sciences Awards & Honours

Recent Honours

Stefanos Aretakis is the recipient of a 2017 Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Sciences. The award, which is worth $100K plus $50K in matching funds from the University, will support his research on mathematical problems in general relativity.

Michael Goldstein has been named a 2018 Simons Fellow. Forty Simons Fellowships in Mathematics are awarded each year to tenured faculty in US and Canadian universities on the basis of "the applicant’s scientific accomplishments in the five-year period preceding the application and on the potential scientific impact of the work to be done during the leave period". (see https://www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons-fellows-in-mathematics/)

Sohee Kang is the recipient of a 2018 University of Toronto Early Career Teaching Award. This award recognizes faculty members who are effective teachers and demonstrate an exceptional commitment to student learning, pedagogical engagement, and teaching innovation. At most four awards of $3000 each are offered annually.

Bob Haslhofer and Giulio Tiozzo were named 2018 Sloan Research Fellows. The highly competitive and prestigious Sloan fellowships are awarded to early-career researchers in a handful of disciplines in US and Canadian universities "in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field" (see https://sloan.org/fellowships/).

Graeme Hirst received the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association. The award was presented to Graeme at the Canadian AI Conference held in Edmonton in May. For more information and a list of past recipients, see the CAIAC awards page.

Anya Tafliovich has won the 2017 UTSC Faculty Teaching Award. This is a prestigious honour, and extremely well-deserved, for her finely honed skills and dedication as an instructor, for her curriculum contributions to CMS software engineering courses, and for her accomplishments in pedagogical research.

Daniel Roy has received a 2017 Google Faculty Research Award, and more recently, a 2017 Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science.. These prestigious awards recognize Dan's foundational research on machine learning, probabilistic programming and Bayesian non-parametrics. Congratulations Dan.

A paper by Nick Cheng and Brian Harrington, entitled The Code Mangler: Evaluating Coding Ability Without Writing Code, received the Exemplary CS Education Paper award at the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Such awards are given to the top papers at this prestigious conference.

John Friedlander and his co-author Henryk Iwaniec have been awarded the 2017 Joseph L. Doob Prize from the American Mathematical Society for their 2010 book entitled Opera de Cribro. For more on the prize, given every three years, along with the book and the full press release, see http://www.ams.org/news?news_id=3226 . The prize was presented at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society in January 2017.

Anya Tafliovich and her co-authors received an Honourable Mention, as runner-up for the best paper, at the 2016 Koli Calling Conference on Computer Science Education Research, one of the premier conferences in the field. Their paper is entitled Revisiting Why Students Drop CS1. Congratulations Anya.

Francisco (Paco) Estrada has won the 2016 Faculty Teaching Award. This is the award given by the UTSC Principal for outstanding achievement in teaching and pedagogical activity. Paco is adored by his students and admired by his colleagues throughout UTSC. This is well deserved recognition for years of outstanding instruction and distinguished leadership within CMS.

In 2016 Principal Bruce Kidd and Vice-Principal Research Bernie Kraatz introduced a UTSC award to recognize exceptional scholars at UTSC. The new award, UTSC Research Excellence Scholar, was given to three faculty in this inaugural year, one of whom was Lisa Jeffrey. Professor Jeffrey’s record of accomplishment over the last 2 decades is truly remarkable. Her many research prizes and honours include the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Krieger-Nelson Prize, the Coxeter-James Prize, and the Steacie Fellowship. She is Fellow of the Fields Institute for Mathematical Research, Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr. Jeffrey has also been named the 2017 Noether Lecturer. The Noether Lectures were established in 1980 to celebrate distinguished women in who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences.

In April 2016, Kathleen Smith was named Professor of the Year by UTSC students. This is an annual award voted by students and given by The Underground, a student run publication at UTSC. CMS is delighted that our students recognize and appreciate the well-honed skills, care and dedication that Professor Smith brings to UTSC every day. Read more about the award in The Underground here.

As of April 2014, Bianca Schroeder is appointed Canada Research Chair in Data Centre Technologies. This is an extremely prestigious honour, recognizing her pioneering work on the performance and reliability analysis of computer systems in internet-scale data centres. Read about all UofT CRCs here. Read about UTSC CRCs here.

CMS Associate Professor of Computer Science, Bianca Schroeder, has been awards an Ontario Early Research Award. Funded by the government of Ontario, this award helps promising, recently-appointed Ontario researchers build their research teams of undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, research assistants, associates, and technicians. The goal of the program is to improve Ontario’s ability to attract and retain the best and brightest research talent.

Bianca Schroeder was one of three computer science faculty awarded the 2013 Outstanding Young Computer Science Research Prize from the national organization of the Canadian Association for Computer Science / Association informatique canadienne. This annual prize is given to computer science faculty at Canadian Universities, within 10 years of their PhD, who have made significant contributions in their careers. These awards were announced this spring and presented in Halifax this summer.

Our esteemed colleague Bálint Virág is the recipient of the 2014 John L. Synge Award awarded by the Royal Society of Canada for his outstanding research. The John L. Synge Award is named in honour of the late John Lighton Synge, FRS, FRSC, one of the first mathematicians working in Canada to obtain international recognition through research in mathematics. He was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto from 1920 to 1925. Bálint was honoured at the 2014 RSC Induction and Awards Ceremony in Quebec City. This RSC site lists previous winners.

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